Ravi Venkatesan is an Indian business executive and venture capitalist who has been the chairman of Microsoft India, chairman of the board of Bank of Baroda, and co-chairman of the board of Infosys. He is also the founder of Social Ventures Partners India, a network of philanthropists.
He is the author of "What The Heck Do I Do With My Life" and “Conquering the Chaos: Win in India, Win Everywhere”.
He has a B. Tech (1985, Mechanical Engineering) from IIT Bombay, an MS from Purdue University and an MBA from Harvard Business School. He is married to Sumitra Gandhi Kulkarni, the great-grandchild of Mahatma Gandhi and Kasturba Gandhi.
Highlights from an interview with Ravi Venkatesan in which he talks about leading Microsoft, surviving the turbulent times, and being relevant in AI era:
On his job interview with Bill Gates in 2003 - what was going to be a 15-minute interview with Bill lasted about an hour and you know he was a very charismatic person then as now and so I got an offer and now I had to make up my mind and I was really conflicted ...because on one hand Microsoft those days was you know the company to join and the chance to be the chairman of that and help build that business was enormously exciting professionally but I was also very scared of failure...it was known to be a super tough culture....many new hires at the VP-SVP levels had joined and left the company and within a year so it was clearly a difficult place...and so I was afraid of failing.
...finally I said look in life you can live your life out on the basis of fear and anxiety or you can live your life based on hope and ambition and so I decided...I don't think I'm going to plan a long career...I'll treat it like a project...so I came in with this project mindset and ended up spending eight years.
every December-January used to be a nightmare for most of us because that was you had to prepare for mid-year review and mid-year review used to last six weeks ...you had to go to Seattle for the worldwide mid-year review...it resembled very much like a gladiator contest in a Roman arena...because all those people would sit around in concentric circles and out here was this intense grueling in the field...there was a lot of blood flowing um and it would last for hours.
On Steve Ballmer - interesting guy...a very very polarizing person with great strengths and some real weaknesses...the thing I admired most about Steve was his intensity...I used to admire where does he get this energy from after 30 years at Microsoft...the second thing I would say is he's one of the most incredibly sharp people I've ever met or worked with.
I think in the 21st century it is a mistake to think of yourself as an employee and seek a job and seek to remain in a job because there is no such thing as a stable job left anymore...it is even scarier to be an employee today because I call it a game of musical chairs where anytime the music can stop when you're out without a chair and it's going faster and faster and faster...so you know for instance a company can reorg suddenly, your job is gone, you can have layoffs, it can change its strategic priorities, you can get a new manager who doesn't like you...boom...you could have been a great performer and you're out...so this is really important now how do you learn to redefine success.
...so the question of what is success and redefining it in terms that are intrinsic to you as opposed to living by somebody else's definition of success is a fundamental part of this journey and I write a lot about it in my book...it's hard to sit there and and think about oh what does success mean to me now...that's not how it works ...what you have to do is try different things and through that process of experimentation trial and error in life you begin to define success...how you define success at 40 is very different at 50 and 60.
VUCA (acronym that stands for volatility, uncertainty, complexity, and ambiguity) - it's a term that was first used by the US Army to describe conditions on the battlefield in war...once war breaks out...nothing works according to your strategy and battle plan...the enemy does crazy things the lines of communication are lost this is called the fog of war...and in these turbulent conditions you have to stay alive and win ...and that describes pretty much the conditions we live in today in this world
ChatGPT - is AI's Steam Engine moment...the first steam engine was invented around 1712...and it was a fairly clunky thing highly inefficient and it was used only for one thing which is pump out water from mines which are flooding and it was until 30 years later that this fellow James Watt who we read about in history books invented a major improvement called the condenser and made it much more efficient and versatile and suddenly the engine found many many applications across transportation, agriculture, power and so on...that's exactly where I think ChatGPT is...it not very useful because nobody knows how it generated the answer right it's a black box, it's a mystery and it generates very plausible responses but often full of errors.
AI is like a rising tide...our job is to figure out how to stay relevant in such a context...the more human you are (with qualities like social skills, communication, ability to work in teams, the ability to lead, creativity, complex problem solving) the more likely you are to be successful ...the more your work involves these things which are intrinsically essentially human the less likely you are to be automated out. What AI is doing is profoundly amplifying the gap between being excellent versus mediocre...if you're excellent at whatever you do...the chances of you being automated are much lower. AI or any technology is like a wind...it has a direction. Now you have to position yourself so it's a tailwind not a headwind...you have to constantly be on the move, constantly learn new things, constantly think of ways to reinvent yourself.
Interviewer: What motivates you to get out of the bed every every day in the morning, what is that one thing that will motivate you
- My dogs!